Saturday, 31 October 2015

SEE ME, FEEL ME, TOMY

It's been raining round here for 48 hours. I think I might get the Red Kite bus to Consett to see the currently homeless Durham City play Seaham Red Star in the FA Vase

Consett's ground has an artificial surface which guarantees play and reminded me of this...

(My friend Jack Lowe's splendid hand-painted Newcastle United team. Jack looks after the Tomy Super Cup Facebook page. You can Like it here https://www.facebook.com/TomySuperCupFootball/?fref=ts )A lot of people thought that 2014
was the greatest World Cup of all time. It wasn’t. The best World Cup in
history was held in a basement in Earl’s Court. It wasn’t organized by Fifa either,
but by my mate Julian’s hairdresser and it was all over in a single Sunday. The
trophy was four inches tall, made of solid plastic and it meant that Peru were
entitled to a free cut and wash (no appointment necessary. Saturdays excluded).
Yes, we are talking about the 1989 Tomy Super Cup World Cup.

For those of you unfamiliar with
the Diego Maradona of Football Games let me explain. Tomy Super Cup was made by
the Japanese toy giants in the mid-1980s (the box features a picture of Howard
Kendal-era Everton playing against one of those Manchester United sides in
which everyone looked like Arthur Albiston) and features two teams of tiny
players who are moved up and down using levers, kicking the ball with a paddle
attached to their feet.

This may sound a bit like the
popular Casdon Soccer that came out in the 1960s. Casdon's game was endorsed by
Bobby Charlton who featured on the box top wearing a bright red cardigan and
grinning manically like someone listening to his fiancee's father telling his
favourite story from thirty years in the double-glazing business, while trying
not to fart.

In homage to the more rigid
tactics of the sixties the players in the Casdon game stayed exactly where they
were. The defenders never left the edge of the penalty area, the forwards
tracked back less than Mark Viduka on Temazepam. In Tomy Super Cup, by
contrast, the players hare up and down the field twisting and whirring. They
are a blur of industry. This is because the game is – quite literally -
electric.

It makes a racket. I admit. In
fact, it sounds pretty much like that moment when one of your kids carries out
an experiment to see what happens if you put Lego in the blender. When it is
switched off at the end of a heavy session you have a ringing in your ears like
someone stuck a brass pail over your head and got Karl Froch to clout it
several times with a claw hammer.

The other minor problem with Tomy
Super Cup is the black-and-white ball, which is the size of a flickable bogey.
(Bogeys traditionally come in three calibrations: wipeable, flickable and stick
under a work surface and blame it on that bloke with the Metallica T-shirt).

Since in times of high excitement
the little players sometimes hoof the ball - in scale terms at least - several
miles over the roof of the stadium, it is wise to Hoover the floor before you
start. Otherwise you are likely to find yourself attempting to conjure a little
magic on the edge of the D with a raisin, chocolate cake crumb, or indeed a
flickable bogey.

Despite these quibbles Tomy Super
Cup remains the best football game that I have played. Better even than Subbuteo
and the estimable Teutonic game of Tipp-Kick, with its clanking metal players
and their chisel-shaped kicking feet and dodecahedron-shaped ball. The only
other game that comes as close to capturing the wild reality of football as
Tomy Super Cup does is Balyna Super Soccer. In Balyna Super Soccer the players
are moved using magnetised rods located under the playing surface.

This is a demented system because
your opponent can use the reverse polarity of his own magnetic rod to chase
your players around the field. As a result the whole match passes by in a
frustrating attempt to influence a team who are totally out of your control and
completely unable to fulfil even the lowest of your expectations - a pretty accurate
representation of every fan's experience of football.

My friend Julian, who was
introduced to Tomy Super Cup by his hairdresser, and has subsequently initiated
just about every likely looking man he meets into the game’s arcane mysteries,
says there were supposed to be more Tomy Super Cup Cups. A European League was
mooted amidst excited talk of away fixtures in the cellars and bedsits of Spain
and Italy. But then it all stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The hairdresser
never explained why, but my belief is that the council intervened after
complaints about the noise from the thrash metal band that were rehearsing the
next door room.

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(Thanks to Kevin Donnelly for the photo)

About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.